A telephony system, such as used in a trading room, supports a range of equipment. By way of example, at each trader's desk of a trading room, such equipment can include up to four telephony handsets, up to 32 loudspeaker channels, and up to two microphones. Unfortunately, disputes can arise in a trading room due to over-hearing and/or mis-hearing of communications provided by such equipment. The availability and quality of recordings of such communications, therefore, can be critical to resolving these disputes.
In a compliance-recording environment, it can be imperative that everything that could have been heard, and therefore acted upon, is recorded. This can include recording speech that was not originally intended for the handset/microphone from which the speech was heard. For instance, recording should be able to accommodate a situation in which a trader hears “buy” and acts on that communication even though the communication was being shouted into another handset.
Conventionally, the stringent recording requirements of a compliance-recording environment have produced recording systems that are deliberately over-sensitive. As a result, such systems tend to record low level audio such as background noise, in addition to the communications of interest. This, in turn, tends to require unnecessarily large amounts of data storage. Correspondingly, it can be difficult to locate a particular communication of interest among the numerous recorded communications.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.